Killzone: Shadow Fall to Have “Framerate Drops” and “Performance Issues” if it Goes Over 24 Enemies On Screen

October 16, 2013
Written by Jason Dunning

In under one month, people in the US and Canada will be able to get their hands on Killzone: Shadow Fall from Guerrilla Games, perhaps the biggest exclusive launch title for the system.

Lead Designer Eric Boltjes has been talking about the game for some time now in the lead up to release, and in his latest interview with OPM, he remarked about how the engine for Shadow Fall is the same as what you saw with the PS3 Killzone titles, “But we had to redo a lot of it. It’s a different architecture so a lot had to be re-written.”

When it comes to the up-scaling of assets on PS4, “Now it’s x4, x8, because everything has to be higher resolution, has to have more details, more loading, more texture mapping. It’s a lot more work to get the production done in that sense.” Overall, “we had to revamp a lot to go next-gen,” but it was “a good thing because we just want to make it better.”

Even with all the power under the hood of the PS4, Boltjes doesn’t see graphics as the most important part of the PS4, as he explained:

For me as a game designer, what I was really interested in was getting more gameplay elements on screen. More enemy types at the same time, more weapon types. Bigger areas. For me that gives us a lot more ingredients to play around with. Previously we were limited. You could have six or seven guys on screen, only two types, and it had to be at a specific range.

With Shadow Fall, Eric revealed that the upper limit of enemies on screen is “about 24… but that’s just enemy AI. And there are other types of enemy AI, lots of destructibility, lots of dynamic objects. Those have much higher limits but the amount of AI is around 24.” If you happen to go over 24, you can expect “framerate drops” and “performance issues,” but those 24 enemies are “all autonomous, they create their own effects. They’re busy little bees.”

Are you surprised to hear about the 24 enemy limit on Killzone: Shadow Fall? Let us know in the comments below.